Ugame

It’s surprising that a social networking site for gamers hasn’t caught on yet. If the restaurant industry has one, I wonder why can’t players have a place that’s platform-neutral and on the Web.

But then, I’m reminded of all the times I’ve joined sites that I thought would be the next big thing only to find out it wasn’t. I’ve dabbled in sites like Ugame and Gamervision and other spots that I don’t exactly remember.

The problem is that I never have enough time among my other social networkingsites to keep up with everything else. I inevitably forget that I signed up for so-and-so site and then I have to sift through e-mail or a shoddy memory for a username and password.

Well, I’ll take the bait and sign up for yet another social networking site for gamers called Raptr. According to 1up.com, Dennis Fong is part of the start-up, so Raptr does have some street cred. The service is all right. It links in to the PlayStation 3, Wii and Xbox 360 accounts and magically updates via the InterWebs.

It all works pretty well. The only thing I’m not too keen on is the optional application that players can add on. It’s filled with decent stuff, including a friend feature and an auto-detect list of games on your PC. Unfortunately, it can’t detect some betas or advanced copies of some PC games.

The other neato site is Vigster, which offers a virtual bookshelf for games. I saw this on Kotaku and I was “eh” about it. There’s already this sort of stuff on Facebook.